The Mutants

The Mutants

We are The Mutants. And it must suck to be you. You with your pretty little cheekbones, neatly-arranged eyeballs and perfectly operational eardrums. You don’t even know what it’s like to sit in the middle of a forest with your feet dangled in the water and your hearing aid clicked off, in complete beautiful silence. When—haha, you poor schmucks—the TV is too quiet you have to dig through the sofa cushions for the remote instead of fiddling a knob on the side of your head. Yet you think we’re the weak, pathetic ones—

That introductory rant was brought to you by Oblivienne, who is, as you can tell, very aggressive. She’s our bassist. She has Goldenhar Syndrome and she’s writing a Disorderist Manifesto, that is, as you would imagine, about a hundred pages of what you have seen above. She’s full of a rage that most people will never come close to understanding. I guess all three of us are, but she, whew, she will singe your eyebrows off just for looking at her funny. Or worse, for not looking at her at all.

If we may introduce the rest of us, without any more self-important interruptions about the pathetic elitism of the normal-faced bourgeoisie–

Don’t get a tone with me.

I’m not a getting a tone. If we keep wrestling with each other for control of the narrative voice the reader won’t know which way is up.

Fuck the reader.

Oblivienne, come on. Macemouth, would you please come over here and calm her down?

That’s Macemouth. Whenever he lays his dark, chubby fingers on her shoulder and looks at her like—like—I don’t know, like she’s the most perfect thing he’s ever beheld, the rage immediately drains from her face. He’s over there, leaning against the windowsill, drumming against the boombox and nodding his head to some beat only he hears. He doesn’t say much and unlike Oblivienne and Bang, he isn’t a mutant. Dude’s a normal-faced, slightly-portly high school kid. We were hesitant about letting him into the band at first, because we wanted to be an all-mutant band, but apparently there isn’t a single mutant in Eastern PA that can drum worth a fuck.

We mentioned Bang and there he is, tucked under the blankets in his bed with a strip of gauze wrapped around his head, trying his best to ignore another Oblivienne rant. He takes a swig from the vodka bottle he hid under his bed and imagines screaming his lyrics into a sweat-beaded, blood-splattered microphone while he snaps his pick in two strumming drop D tuned power chords.

Bang’s mutation is Apert Syndrome. His eyes bulge out of his head and his ear canals are righteously fucked and his fingers are tangled tiny stumps so the only chord he can possibly play is a basic power chord. But who the hell needs the pretty sprawl of G major anyway?

He just got home from his latest surgery. This one was just to install a new BAHA implant on the side of his head. No big deal. For those of you so boring that you don’t know what a BAHA implant is, it’s a type of bone conduction hearing aid that is clicked onto a screw drilled into the side of your motherfucking head. It’s essentially the most hardcore piercing in the history of the earth.

So that’s us. We’re sitting around Bang’s room, doing jack shit other than admiring the scenery. The walls are drenched in scotch-taped faces, mohawked, screaming and spewing flecks of vomit, smashing guitars against beer- and piss-soaked stages. A well-worn Ramones 45 sits atop the record player. (Oblivienne thinks the Ramones are overrated and this is the most absurd thing Bang has ever heard.) A secondhand tube amp sits unplugged in the corner and wires snake through the fuzz boxes and distortion pedals that litter the floor.

Now there should be, like, a narrative to move things along, because it’s icky to just read descriptions of people and you feel like you’re mired in verbal muck and you begin to wonder if you should just skip right over us because we’re too boring, too much like real human beings to care about. Well, fuck your narrative. We write what we want to.

There is a story though, if you’d calm down for a second. Since you’re being so pushy, here’s an idea! We’ll tell you something instead of showing you! Won’t that be fun?

Bang has secret dreams of fame but he’s crippled by stage fright.

—

Bang takes another swig from the half-empty vodka bottle.

“You wanna shut up?” he says to Oblivienne.

“What the fuck?” she says.

“I truly don’t give a single damn about Proudhon.”

“Yes, the deaths of billions of innocents due to the military industrial complex is soooo boring, isn’t it?”

“None of this shit matters, it’s all pointless. You can’t do anything about it anyway. Let’s just write fucking music.”

The vodka bottle gurgles as he takes a swig and grimaces. “I have some new lyrics.”

“Oh great. What did you write about this time? Balls? Farting? Really revolutionary stuff.”

“Shut up, I think I got something.”

Fart on the popo!

Everybody everywhere, yeah, fart on the popo!

Beats us with clubs

Kill us with guns

So open our pants

And stick out your ass

And fart on the popo!

“Wow. So amazing. How long did it take you to write that gem? Years, I bet.”

“So why don’t you write some then?”

“I play bass. And I’m busy with the Manifesto, you fuck. Something with, you know, actual ideas in it?”

“Oh, Miss Disorderist punk princess with her wittle ideas!”

“You’re such an ass!” Oblivienne chucks a jewel case at Bang’s head.

“Hey, watch it! I’m disabled as fuck right now,” Bang says, ducking out of the way.

“Like shit.” She smirks.

“Well, I am.” Bang writhers on the bed, in a stirring facsimile of agony. It’s the same act he used to get his mom to let him stay home from school today. He spent the day hunched over a scrap of paper and swigging the vodka he stole from his parents’ liquor cabinet.

The sound of footsteps slips through the thin crevice of the door. The unamplified bass Oblivienne had been plucking at, and Macemouth’s tabletop drumming, fall silent.

“Bang?” his mom says, knocking softly on the door and peaking in. “There’s someone here to see you!”

Katy and Donovan, the leaders of the school’s Helping Hands Club slither into the room, their faces brightly beaming. Now, we know you want the plot to move like a Black Flag bassline, but it would take reams of paper to show you how much we hate Katy and Donavan, so we’re going to just tell you. Cool? No? Too fucking bad.

We’re nothing to them but ugly little mascots. Our bulging eyes and webbed fingers are just a little line in the volunteer section of their CV, to show a boring, preppy liberal arts college that they’re well rounded and so liberally-minded that they lowered themselves to help poor ugly, damn near broken people like us.

Our faces disgust them so much that the only reaction they can show us is pity. They follow us around the halls waiting for us to stumble or trip so they can lend us a helping shoulder while making loud grunts so that everyone’s eyes turn.

They don’t hear us. They don’t know us. And they don’t care to. They never, not once, not even accidentally, actually had a conversation with us. Whenever we’re nearby, they raise their voices like they’re talking to a spittle-flecked infant. When Oblivienne had her BAHA implant operation, these fucks appeared in her hospital room the next day, their eyes bursting with what they think is love. Katy slathered the room in bright sparkly balloons and set a Forever 21 makeup kit beside Oblivienne’s bed, and patted her hand like she was a feeble old woman. If you knew Oblivienne, even in a cursory way, you’d know that not a speck of makeup had ever touched her face and while she does love balloons, she likes them dark and grey and preferably bearing skulls. The only reason she didn’t literally rip Katy’s arm from the rest of her body was the sedatives coursing through her brain. After she got out, we used all that sparkly bullshit to make a bonfire, and oh how we guffawed when the blush and mascara burnt to cinders.

So pardon us for not being amped to see their cheerful, expectant faces.

“The fuck do you want?” Oblivienne says.

Katy sets down a gift basket, filled with incense sticks for some reason, fruits for even less of a reason, and oh god . . . oh god, please say it isn’t so . . . a Simple Plan CD.

Katy tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. She smiles and nods so knowingly at Oblivienne. “I know this is a tough time. But I’m here for you. We’re here for you, if any of you ever want to talk.”

She looks at Bang and his flushed face drops. Donovan, the boring cheekboned fuck, slides a hand into Katy’s back pocket and drones on about how brave Bang is, how he is suuuuuch an inspiration. Oblivienne wants to vomit. All over their shoes. All over their eyes so they never have to look at Bang ever again.

“Just get the fuck out of here,” she says. She knots her fingers into a fist as Bang twirls the bedsheet around his finger stumps, trying not to meet Donovan’s ever-present stare.

“Honey. I know surgeries are hard on everybody. I truly empathize with you. I really do. I hear you. I hear your pain.” Katy’s eyes gleam as she looks at Donovan and his lips curl and he pants like he wants to rip off her tennis skirt and fuck her right there on the floor.

“Should we tell them?” Katy asks.

“Yeah. Let’s.”

“We would like to announce that we have organized a benefit concert on your behalf. And . . .” She lets the “and” trail off in a trilly singsong and roves her gaze around the room. “. . . we’d like you guys to be the headlining act! Won’t that be wonderful?!”

The air conditioner buzzes. A cockroach flits behind the thin plaster walls.

“It’s a week from now. On Sunday,” she says. It’s weird, the bright glow that erupts into people’s faces when they’re proud of themselves.

“We didn’t want to stay long, mmkay?” Donovan croons. “We just wanted to deliver the good news and get out of your hair. Oh! I see you have your instruments out already! That’s great. It’s so great that you don’t let your disorders stand in the way of doing what you love.” He grabs Katy by the waist and they shuffle down the steps.

“I agree it’s a stupid-ass concert. But! We could write a bunch of songs that are basically fuck you’s to the entire idea. Maybe, if we scream it loud enough, they’ll actually listen and get the fuck off our backs. And if they don’t”—he pulls a lighter out of his pocket and flicks it—“then we can give our biographers something worth writing about.”

So yeah. After we decided to actually do the stupid thing, mainly for Bang’s benefit—and because hey, why the fuck not—Bang threw himself into writing lyrics like we’ve never seen before. It seemed like he actually had something to say for once and he was bursting to scream it into an audience of dumbstruck and awestruck people. He scribbled and strummed as Oblivienne and Macemouth watched in the corner. Macemouth’s eyes gleamed and Oblivienne expressed her disappointment in Bang by harrumphing loudly behind her bass. She hates his thirst for the bright oval of the spotlight and the carrot dangling from a stick of fame.

There’s isn’t much else to say about the week leading up to the concert. It passed by boring and lifeless as any other fucking week. It would be nice—yeah, sure—if there were some plot turns and pinches to move the story along, right, but life doesn’t work that way. Bang’s mom made him go back to school and she discovered the empty vodka bottle under his bed but felt bad about grounding him right after his BAHA surgery so she let him off the hook with a stern warning. We set a trash can on fire in science class, we dreamed of sloppily-fingered power chords in math class, and thrashed in Oblivienne’s garage or Bang’s room.

Life. Pretty boring. You look bored. You look like you want a something to actually happen. That’s how literature works, right? You’d rather us dump a bunch of rose and lily prose and plot twists all over our ugly faces and the dull throb of our lives until it is unrecognizable but so much more palatable for you to digest. I get it. Life is hard. And prolly meaningless in the end. When you flip open the fresh pages of a piece of high-class literature, you want to forget about how blah life really is, you want to let the samey-same ideas of death and love cascade over your bland, normal face. You haven’t got to experience the rush of anesthetic gasses seeping into your lungs every summer, or had your eyes sewn shut after a particularly brutal surgery, and you don’t hear the roar of baby tigers when you click your hearing aid off, you don’t even have a fucking hearing aid, and since you haven’t really got to live, or experience much of anything at all, you want to be swept away by fast-moving plots and pretty, inoffensive prose dripping with strong verbs. Passive voice is a thing you don’t like. Hey. We get it. We’re nothing if not accommodating. So here. For you poor fucks:

One afternoon, as we splayed across Bang’s room in varying states of intoxication, the week scudding by us bland and unnoticed like the math figures Mr. Rawlins scribbles onto the gleaming, alabaster board, we heard the delicate rap of knuckles on glass. The most sober of us, Oblivienne, casted the bright blue moons of her eyes toward Bang’s window. She nudged Macemouth in his stomach.

There are certain times in life when a person experiences a shock so great that their body, their lips, the very soul that buzzes between their ribcages goes limp and soft, incapable of anything but muted ataraxia. Macemouth gaped at the figure flapping its wings behind the fusty, dust-caked glass as his eyes, his mind, slowly glazed over with shock. Oblivienne tucked her fingers under the chipped wooden window frame and let the man flutter into the room. As he curled his wings behind his back, several feathers shook loose and cascaded to the floor.

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it, son?”

Clipped syllables and frothy gasps escaped Macemouth’s throat as he struggled, with every wisp of grey matter he had, to dredge up a sentence to express the revulsion, the unbounded love for this man he buried for so long under his rolls of jiggling belly flab.

“It’s okay,” his father said. His gravelly, life-soaked voice faltered too. “I just needed to see you one last time before—” His gaze flitted over his shoulder as the sound of gun pops echoed in the distance.

“Father.”

“I may not see you again. Things are complicated. I wish I could have been there. I wish. I wish things were different.”

“Father, you can’t go!”

“I must. I hope you’ll understand one day. Don’t hate me.”

“I—”

“I love you. I always have. A day hasn’t gone by where I haven’t thought about you. Your mother.”

“But . . . Father—”

Bright flashes of gunfire and slim fingers of smoke crept closer. Macemouth’s dad unfurled his wings, knocking over a sheath of Bang’s lyrics and making them drift to the floor like dead leaves. He took Macemouth’s hand in his grasp, his fingers numbed by layers of callouses. He pumped his son’s hand once, firmly and quickly, before he sailed out the window, into the light breeze and the grey tendrils of approaching smoke. The heaviness of being alive, being human, hit us all for the first time as we watched his father dwindle to a speck in the azure cloud-strewn sky and all we could do, in that fleeting moment, was gape and wonder and let the strange, haunting beauty of life wash over our strange, misshapen faces.

There. I hope you forgot about how empty life really is, how none of this actually matters, how we are spinning on a boring meaningless-ass rock, and the sky will eventually twinkle with the glimmers of a heat death-dappled galaxy.

—

The day came for the show and the plot picked up again and everybody breathed a sigh of relief. Everybody but Bang. He quivered and stumbled through the cluttered halls as Oblivienne pushed through the swamp of forgettable faces. They patted our backs and thanked us for coming, and my, my, how inspiring we were! People pointed at us and clasped their hands together like we were the most amazing things they had ever see in their lives, like they couldn’t believe that we even have the capacity to get out of bed in the morning, looking as ugly as we do. Bang hung his head, trying not to lose the excitement he felt. He pictured S.O.A writhing and thrashing, not giving a single fuck in the whole world. He pictured Svetlana, the popular girl he secretly had a crush on, also writhing, but in a distinctly different way from Henry Rollins.

We reached the backstage area and clicked the door shut behind us. The pity softly tapped against the locked door like the gentle slap of zombie hands fumbling against a locked gate for your brains.

“God. Fucking idiots. You sure you want to do this?” Oblivienne asked Bang.

“Yeah. Shit,” he said, unlatching the guitar case.

“Your face is beet red.”

“I’m hot, okay? Hot.”

“Don’t let those people do that to you. You’re better than them. Though they think the opposite.”

“Why must you always be like this?”

“Uh, like what?”

“I dunno, bitchy? Acting like you’re superior?”

Oblivienne laid her hand on Bang’s shoulder as Macemouth pulled a steel pipe and a crowbar from the guitar case.

—

Now we stand in the stage wings as the lights dim and polite applause ripples through the crowd. A lump forms in Bang’s throat and he begins to think that yeah, shit, Oblivienne was right to say this was a stupid idea, because he can think of nothing but the comfort of his room and his records.

Oblivienne leans against her bass as Macemouth checks out her ass and prays to Whatever Is Up There that she won’t catch him. Because if she happens to hear the rapid drumbeat of his heart and glances over her shoulder while he’s staring not only at her butt—apple-shaped and glorious—but the way her hair droops against her shoulders, the way she cocks her hips and arches her long, slender neck, as he imagines the calm radiating intelligence and anger of her eyes, the way the droopy side of her face and the high cheekboned side meld together to create a human being who is not one beautiful face but two molded together . . . well, he can’t even imagine what unspeakable violence she’d inflict upon him.

“Before the act you all have been so patiently waiting for comes out on the stage, I would like to say a few words.” Katy stands on the stage, bathed in the glow of the spotlight. She pauses to admire all those eyes watching her. “I would just like to say that this band is among the bravest, most inspiring human beings you will ever meet. They don’t . . .” Her voice quivers. Her eyes glisten and she makes sure to angle her face juuust right, so that the spotlight glints off the single tear trickling down her face. “They don’t let their disabilities get in the way of their life. They don’t use them as an excuse. They do what they love no matter how many obstacles they must overcome. It is a lesson to us all to be thankful for what we have, the blessings that have been bestowed on [blah blah blah yipee pity and patronizing bullshit].”

Oblivienne clenches her fists. Macemouth promptly removes his eyes from her backside.

“Please welcome to the stage, the bravest people in Cocalico High, The Mutants!” Katy bows and, as we walk onto the stage, she does that thing where someone claps toward you, we guess to make sure that you know that this delicate slab of bone-on-bone is just for little old you. Then she hops off the stage into Donovan’s outspread arms.

Bang steps into the light and Oblivienne spits on the floor. The rage in her eyes could burn Satan’s balls off his body. She wants to ravage everything. Burn everything. But she won’t. Not yet. She looks at Bang’s face as he trembles into the spotlight heat. He’s bloated and red-faced, and his eyes bulge out of his head more than normal.

Bang grabs the mic. Silence, except for slurps of lemonade from somewhere. The mic pops as he rests his head against the cool, dimpled oval. He can’t move. He can’t do anything. Why the hell won’t his body move? Oblivienne tries to send him ESP signals: “Move! Thrash! Do something!” The harsh glare of the spotlight beats down against his head for a minute or an eternity, it’s hard to tell. A guy in the back starts clapping, and shortly the whole place erupts with applause.

“We believe in you!”

“You’re so brave!”

“We love you!”

And finally. Ahh, finally—there it is. Oblivienne smiles as she sees the beautiful rage bleed from Bang’s eyes. Bang points to Macemouth. He taps 1 2 3 4 on his drum sticks and Oblivienne’s bass rips holes through the ceiling and Bang strums chords that are barely even chords, barely even music, but it doesn’t matter anymore what we sound like as long as they hear us. We play the opening bars to the new song that Bang wrote that Oblivienne actually doesn’t completely hate:

Pity party tonite!
Pity party alright!
Pity party tonite!
Pity party alriiiight!

We’ll circle jerk to our broken bones
And tongue-fuck pity like an ice cream cone
We’ll open up our mouths
And get down on our knees
As you come come come
Dreaming of our disease

Over there, a guy does the Carlton. Moms and dads nod their heads as Bang’s words spill out of his mouth, saying everything he has ever wanted to say but couldn’t without the backing of a kick drum and bass. Bang’s wolf-shriek growls splash against the audience faces like delicate mists of spring rain. You can almost see the words dripping down their earlobes, never even reaching their brain.

Katy and Donovan cuddle beside the punch bowl, whispering into each others’ ears as the last B chord warbles away into silence. Bang’s chest heaves, and we’re pretty sure we’ve never seen him so happy before. It lasts a beautiful second until he stares past the blinding flash of the spotlight into the blank faces of the audience.

He motions to Macemouth to start the next song and he taps 1 2 3 4 on his sticks and Bang leans into the microphone to spill his guts out to the deaf fuckers once again; maybe they’ll finally understand this time . . . but no sound escapes the mic and Oblivienne’s bass plucks are quieter than a Good Charlotte track.

Katy rushes toward the stage. Donovan swirls fruit punch around in his plastic cup, hovering over the knobs of the sound mixing table, never taking his eyes off Katy, never once looking at Bang. Oblivienne seriously considers killing Donovan, imagining the life draining from his eyes as he lays in a widening pool of his own blood, trying to form the words why why why me but being too weak and lifeless, the dumb fuck.

But before her uneasily dark musings can go any further, Katy climbs onto the stage to wrestle control of the mic.

“Hey! Sorry about that, but we wanted you to say a few words before the next song! Tell us about yourself. Your journey. So we can learn and be inspired.” She hands the mic back to Bang and waits expectantly.

Bang’s hands tremble. He can’t say anything more than he has already screamed. Katy places her hand on his shoulder and we see her mouth move—something about how it’s okay, and how she is here, and to let it all out, we are listening. We are your friends.

Macemouth’s eyes had been constantly monitoring the Oblivienne situation for any changes in bending or any glances of cleavage so he immediately notices when the sparks flare up in her eyes. It’s Plan B time. He dives backstage and retrieves the steel pipe and the crowbar, and slips back on just as he hears a thunderous crunch and sees Oblivienne on top of Katy, balling her hair in her fists and screaming obscenities that even we are too uncomfortable to repeat. Macemouth shouts her name and she’s so startled to hear him call for her with so much force and passion that her hands drop Katy’s head. She catches the crowbar he tosses to her and blows him a kiss. Oh God— the trembling begins in his knees, but shit, is he happy as he jumps off the stage and wades into the crowd with the steel pipe held aloft.

The stupor that had gained hold of Bang slowly releases itself and it dawns on him that Plan B is happening. He fumbles in his pocket for the packet of lighters he brought and rips open the package. Ah, and by now the fear is starting to take hold. The shock of seeing Katy fucking wrecked, son, on stage, left the crowd warbled and dazed but now, as Macemouth flips over the lemonade stand and Oblivienne smashes the popcorn table to splinters and Bang climbs the bleachers to the flags and sets the fabric ablaze, a ripple of screams passes through the crowd.

Katy weeps, still lit up by the spotlight, clutching the top of her head. By now, the flags are burning and Oblivienne is wailing as Macemouth gleefully slams his steel pipe into every table, every glass bowl, every container of liquid he can find. Tiny fires sprout up around Bang as he hops here and there, laughing like a fucking lunatic, touching his lighter to shit like the pope giving benedictions.

There is no greater feeling of release than (I know you know of it, though folks don’t like referencing icky things in their pretty little literary tales of death and cheating wives) finally sitting or standing over the toilet bowl and releasing a nice long-held-in piss. Well, that’s how we feel as the gym descends into pure oligarchy (see how stupid it sounds to use a system of societal structure as a synonym for chaos?), and we listen to the pained gasps of anguish and confusion as their pretty little bake sale cookies crumble.

Security guards tumble into the the gym, barking where are they, where the fuck are they? and the crowd points at our flitting shadows and cough from the smoke clouds, and people file out of the gym as Mr. Rutt says everything will be okay, just be calm.

We feel everyone’s hatred. Their fear. And there isn’t a scrap of pity left in their eyes as they run past the flames and Macemouth’s swinging crowbar. We are no longer little bugs they hold on the tips of their fingers, to marvel at their tininess and ugliness.

The guards swarm us, joined by blue-suited pigs (don’t call them pigs, that’s cruel to the pigs. Oblivienne, not now—wait, you’re right). Ahem! Joined by the blue-suited pieces of shit, wielding guns like bibles and billy clubs like divine hammers.

God, how we laugh as they shove us in the back of the police van.

People are always trying to put us in their neat little boxes like this. Where we won’t yell or stomp or curse or be anything but the polite, inspirational disabled people they so want us to be. Where they can leave us until the moment when they are feeling bad about their own lives, then trot us out of our dark corners to remind themselves how much better their lives are than ours. Like tiny snorts of ugly cocaine. See, behind the soundproof walls of our cages, they can shower us with pity and sorrowful looks and pretend like they are soo much better than us, without our pesky voices saying, “Yo. Shut the fuck up.”

Our commingled voices whip through the back of the police van, as fear and confusion rage outside. Ah, but we guess once a person realizes how much better we are than a normal-faced fuck, that their lives are sad and boring and lifeless, the reaction would be fear and confusion.

We clang our handcuffed fists against the metal walls of the police van and stomp our feet. Oblivienne leans against Macemouth, her head flung back in laughter, the tiny nubs of her left ear tickling the side of his head. She kisses him on the cheek and he swallows his fucking heart. Bang thrashes against his cuffs, no longer afraid of any fucking thing. Though our hands are cuffed, our larynxes are free, so we scream at the very top of our motherfucking lungs:

ABOUT US

Defiant Scribe is an online lit mag created for the 21st century. We offer an updated take on the literary magazine with contemporary content: writing that takes risks, explores heavy or taboo topics, is diverse and inclusive, and always defiant, always unique.